Experimentation Reveals Evidence for Genetic Memory

James Gallagher, Health and Science Reporter for BBC News, filed a fascinating story on the BBC News Web site this morning. In experiments with mice, researches at Emory University appear to have discovered that aversion to a scent (in this case that of cherry blossoms) could result in modification of a specific section of DNA. This would result in offspring sharing that aversion without any past experience of it.

The concept of genetic memory has been a favorite topic in bull sessions about the relationship between environment and heredity. While this experiment involves a highly limited phenomenon is a small sample space, it is still a sign that this concept may be more than a vacuous fantasy. If the mechanism actually works, it can explain how the survival value of avoiding certain toxins can be passed down to future generations. We should be more careful about any phenomena that exist outside of the objective world, but it should not be long before writers of fiction decide to start playing with this concept!

Materialism and Teleology

The latest issue of The New York Review of Books has a fascinating article by biologist H. Allen Orr entitled “Awaiting a New Darwin.” The piece is a review of Thomas Nagel’s latest book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, which came out last September. Nagel is as disciplined in philosophy as Orr is in biology. Both have a longstanding reputation for the clear exposition of propositions based strictly on logical reasoning, rather than rhetorical showboating. Orr makes it clear that Nagel’s book should not be casually dismissed, but he makes it equally clear that he does not feel that Nagel’s claims have been adequately warranted.

Nagel’s point of departure is a familiar one, based on the nature of human consciousness. Nagel’s position is that consciousness is too subjective to be reduced to a materialist explanation based on the physical nature of brains and neurons (and, perhaps, matter itself). With this as a premise, he then claims that the current Neo-Darwinist model of natural selection cannot explain how consciousness came to be and offers, as an alternative, an approach he called “natural teleology.” Orr tries to clarify this approach with the following sentence:

Natural teleology doesn’t depend on any agent’s intentions; it’s just the way the world is.

Without going into details, I feel it necessary to recognize that, for many (Jürgen Habermas being a particularly good example), teleology is a highly objective process. From a mathematical point of view, one may think of it as the achievement of some goal, which may be represented as a point in some multidimensional landscape. The “world as it is,” so to speak, is another point in that landscape and teleology is concerned with how those two points are connected by a path and how that path may be found. This boils down to the mathematical problem of optimization, which means that Nagel seems to be advocating an objective technique to explain how we arrive at a subjective phenomenon, a materialist stance if ever there were one.

On the other hand the philosopher Isaiah Berlin has written very critically about the inadequacy of optimization (or, in his terminology, Utopian thinking). Berlin’s basic argument, nicely formulated in his essay “The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West,” is that any Utopia, like that point of optimization on a multidimensional landscape, is static, meaning that, one a society or an individual “gets there,” so to speak, there is nowhere to go! Thus, in the subjective world, the only “static state” is death; and in the broader ecological scope of the natural world, even death is not a static point.

At least some of the materialist Neo-Darwinists are aware of this puzzle. Thus, the traditional Darwinian model of evolution through natural selection has given way to what has come to be called coevolution. The basic idea is that there is still a landscape; but the shape of that landscape changes to reflect what its “inhabitants” are doing. As the landscape changes, the “optimum point” on that landscape also changes. This means that, wherever you happen to be on the landscape, you have to keep rethinking the direction you want to go in order to get closer to your goal. This strikes me as what makes “natural” teleology natural, rather than merely mathematical. Back in October of 2011, I suggested that, because of coevolution, there may never be that “ideal” cure for the common cold. Every time new medication comes along, the landscape changes, and the cold virus follows natural selection according to a change in the criteria for fitness. (In that same post I suggest that the common cold is not that different from malware.)

Nagel never mentions coevolution in his book. However, Orr does not cite it either as a materialist school of thought. Many of its advocates came out of early research in artificial life, although Darwin himself described it in On the Origin of Species. To be fair, however, Nagel’s book is a short one, only 130 pages, which he uses simply to establish his position. Here is hoping that he develops that position in greater depth and that his digging will lead him to coevolution!

A Culture that Sees Darwin as More Evil than Hitler?

Anita Singh, Showbusiness Editor for the London Telegraph, has just written a piece about Creation, the new film about Charles Darwin during the time leading up to the completion and publication of On The Origin of Species. If her account is accurate, then its message about the prevailing culture in the United States is, to say, the least, chilling:

Creation, starring Paul Bettany, details Darwin's "struggle between faith and reason" as he wrote On The Origin of Species. It depicts him as a man who loses faith in God following the death of his beloved 10-year-old daughter, Annie.

The film was chosen to open the Toronto Film Festival and has its British premiere on Sunday. It has been sold in almost every territory around the world, from Australia to Scandinavia.

However, US distributors have resolutely passed on a film which will prove hugely divisive in a country where, according to a Gallup poll conducted in February, only 39 per cent of Americans believe in the theory of evolution.

Movieguide.org, an influential site which reviews films from a Christian perspective, described Darwin as the father of eugenics and denounced him as "a racist, a bigot and an 1800s naturalist whose legacy is mass murder". His "half-baked theory" directly influenced Adolf Hitler and led to "atrocities, crimes against humanity, cloning and genetic engineering", the site stated.

The film has sparked fierce debate on US Christian websites, with a typical comment dismissing evolution as "a silly theory with a serious lack of evidence to support it despite over a century of trying".

Two points in this account stuck in my mind. The first was the statistic that "only 39 per cent of Americans believe in the theory of evolution." I have always seen myself as part of a minority, one way or another; but it had not occurred to me that, in this particular case, my minority should be as low as was reported.

The more interesting point, however, says something about our cultural reaction to the very idea of telling biographical stories at all. It had to do with this idea of Darwin as an influence on Hitler. I would hope that most of my readers remember a 2002 film named Max. The name referred to the influential Viennese art dealer Max Rothman, who was played by John Cusack in the film. More specifically, it concerns the rather odd relationship that ensued when Rothman took under his wing a World War One veteran and aspiring painter named Adolf Hitler. One of the things we learn is that, in his time, Rothman was a champion of what, towards the end of the twentieth century came to be called "performance art." At the end of the film, Hitler abandons his painting in favor of exercising his gift for oratory on a (then insignificant) National Socialist party. I have always felt that the film's conclusion offered the ironic suggestion that Hitler was drawn to this party because it provided him with an opportunity for what he saw as pretty much the same thing as Rothman's performance art events.

The important point for this discussion is that Max shows Hitler in a very sympathetic light. This struck me as a rather bold thing to do, since I could imagine any number of people who would be violently offended by any impression of Hitler that was even slightly favorable. Nevertheless, the film (which was made in the Netherlands under Hungarian, Canadian, and British production companies) had no trouble getting American distribution, followed by release on DVD and scheduling on cable. This leads me to conclude that, in some perverse way, American culture sees Darwin as so much more evil than Hitler that any insights into the man's biography would be tantamount to a pact with the Devil (and there appear to be only 39 per cent of us who disagree with this proposition)! Could this say something about why the will behind our willful ignorance of history is as strong as it is?

An Evolutionary Perspective on Vice

Every now and then I encounter a Huffington Post blogger whom I know through his/her more professional publications. Gary Marcus is such a blogger; and his post about Eliot Spitzer, "Client 9: What was he Thinking?," has helped me to sort out the issues in a scandal that has surprised me more for the media attention it has received (even from the BBC World Service) than for the act itself. What is most important about this post is that Marcus has been academically precise in his terminology at a time when most representatives of the media are fulminating in language that, while vague and sloppy, is probably driving up the price of those advertising slots I mentioned in conjunction with another controversial issue.

It is in the interest of such precise terminology that I feel it is important to frame Spitzer's behavior with the fundamental premise that all actions have consequences. It is within this frame that we can best appreciate Marcus' strategy of appealing to Freudian theory for an explanation:

This is not just a case of a man being led about his hormones, to the exclusion of the rest of his brain, but something more complicated: a case in which an extraordinarily intelligent man used all of his rational capacities to form a track-covering plan -- yet seemingly focused none of his cognitive wherewithal on evaluating whether that plan was worth pursuing in the first place.

Freud, wrong about so much else, was certainly right that the mind is forever locked in internal conflict; where he talked about "id" and "ego", modern scholars see something slightly different, a clash between "ancestral systems" and more modern "deliberative cognition", but for present purposes the point is much the same. Id beat ego, just as it has so many times before.

Why does this happen so often? The answer, in a nutshell, is this; evolution blew it. When our fancy new deliberative reasoning systems evolved, evolution, which lacks foresight, took what amounts to the lazy way out, crudely grafting the new capabilities onto the older ancestral systems, with nary a thought as to how the two would work together. The ancestral mate seeking systems that led Client 9 by the nose thus still receive extremely high priority, whether or not their actions are in the interests of our minds as a whole.

One of the great advances in brain science in recent years has been in our understanding of how the human brain can "reason about the future," so to speak, particularly in terms of "envisioning" the consequences of an action being considered. The Freudian model gives us a "conceptual" (rather than physiological) localization of such brain activity; and that localization is the Ego. However, no matter how good the Ego may be at dispassionate reasoning about consequences (and, as has been amply demonstrated, Spitzer was very good at this), it is always in conflict with those "drives" that are the domain of the Id; and Marcus was right to reduce this whole argument to the question of why Id is so good at beating Ego.

Personally, I like his appeal to evolution but dislike his portrayal of evolution as an agent with intentions (which he may have done for the sake of a more readable text). It is not a question of what evolution intended but of who has survived the process of selection. This introduces the hypothesis that, while both Ego and Id clearly contribute to our survival as a species, when "push comes to shove," as it were, the Id carries more weight in survival value. Think of all those situations in which survival depends on aggression unattenuated by reflection, such as, at the risk of taking a sensitive example, what it takes to have an effective military force. This is not to say that Spitzer's specific behavior had survival value; but, like it or not, it was part of the baggage that came along in the relationship between Ego and Id that led to the survival of our species. As Jimmy McNulty (a paragon of unbridled Id) said on The Wire, "It is what it is!"

Virtual Morlocks

Until this morning I had not realized that there was a "Continental Automated Buildings Association" (CABA). According to CRM Buyer, they are "a nonprofit industry association that promotes advanced technologies for the automation of homes and buildings in North America." In other words they traffic in the sort of automation-based utopianism that we encounter among those trying to inject the Internet into every corner of our everyday life. This is the sort of vision that is their stock-in-trade:

In the not-so-distant future, the mundane will become borderline miraculous. The home washing machine will order its own repairs and the sprinkler system will call you on your cell phone to say the lawn service has broken one of its water spouts and it is now wasting water.

The car will tell you to pull over -- its left rear tire is low on air -- and, by the way, the service department at the local dealership has an opening on Thursday, if that's convenient for you. There seems to be a problem since your garage sensors have reported oil drippings on its floor.

Next, your home security system will ring you up and ask if it should let the repairman in to perform the service your washing machine ordered. The repairman's work order number matches the one the washing machine assigned, so the service call is legit, reports the security system. "Press one to allow entry with video surveillance, two to reschedule the repairman or three to summon the police," it might say.

Hopefully, this kind of writing will send at least a few of us back to H. G. Wells' Time Machine, or at least the summary that Wikipedia now provides. Recall that the protagonist of this novel discovers a future of two races, the Eloi and the Morlocks. The former are gentle and, at first blush, seem to indicate that the lost Garden of Eden has finally been recovered. The latter are coarse and cannibalistic but are also the only life forms that can maintain the machines that, in turn, maintain the Eloi's Edenic existence. Thus, as the Wikipedia article points out, this Garden of Eden is less of a paradise than one might initially take it to be:

The Utopian existence of the Eloi turns out to be deceptive. The Traveller soon discovers that the class structure of his own time has in fact persisted, and the human race has diverged into two branches. The wealthy, leisure classes appear to have devolutionised into the ineffectual, not very bright Eloi he has already seen; but the downtrodden working classes have evolved into the bestial Morlocks, cannibal hominids resembling albino apes, who toil underground maintaining the machinery that keep the Eloi – their flocks – docile and plentiful. Both species, having adapted to their routines, are of distinctly sub-human intelligence.

Writing not that long after Wells, Karl Mannheim observed that utopianism, just like blind ideology, provides a significant impediment to serious critical thinking. The problem is that, when we get too fixated on our favorite ideals, that fixation tends to our inhibit any thoughts of the consequences in which those ideals may be embedded. This is why Neustadt and May placed so much emphasis on the need to anticipate consequences when making critical decisions in a time of crisis. It is also why I have tried to apply there advise to the assessment of new technologies, bemoaning that fact that, as a rule, innovators tend to place more weight on "cool" than on "consequences."

So, do I really believe that CABA is promoting a technology of "virtual Morlocks" that will build up a customer base that will turn us into a world of mindless and ineffectual Eloi? I suppose the most telling indicator in the CRM Buyer is a comment from a Gartner analyst about market potential:

Sheer laziness and freedom from boring things are two of the biggest drivers.

In other words we have come to view the day-to-day activities of life as too boring to deserve attention; so we have become too lazy to summon the will to act on them. This is the point at which we have to invoke another important lesson from Neustadt and May: In a time of crisis, the first thing you have to do is ask, "How did we get into this mess?" How has life itself become so boring to us? As I suggested in exploring the concept of "secular Messianism," I see this as a consequence of the ways in which mass media have addicted up to believe in the deus ex machina, yet another example of how utopianism inhibits our critical thinking.

I read The Time Machine as a cautionary tale about what happens when a utopian vision actually gets implemented. The most important consequence is that the resulting sentient life-forms lose most, if not all, of the characteristics that, in our own vague way, we tend to associate with the concept of "humanity." As Isaiah Berlin pointed out in so many of his essays, the preservation of our underlying humanity is more important than whether or not we can realize our personal ideals through technology. Part of that humanity is that we do not all share the same ideals; and the last thing we want is for difference of opinion to turn into a conflict that technology resolves by turning us into "winners" and "losers." By stereotyping what those winners and losers might eventually become, Wells prepared us for Berlin's injunction that civil discourse about our differing values is more important (and more human) than trying to reduce the assessment of those values to "right" and "wrong."